Night Two-Hundred and Twenty-Four

but wait, there's more

Today was the day that I was supposed to get on an airplane and fly back home. But yesterday, on night two-hundred and twenty-three, I instead found myself back on that familiar TGV from Paris to Aix (and then stranded, briefly, in the Aix train station, but that's another story) and now, as I type this, I am looking out the window at this:



I can't imagine that there is anyone reading my blog who doesn't already know the story behind why I'm still in Manosque. But, if you're out there, lurking, and you want to know, I guess you'd better either declare yourself or learn to live with the mystery. At any rate, I'll be here.

Night One-Hundred and Ninety-Two

la vitesse

How can thirty-five days have passed since my last post?

We all seem to be experiencing an inverse relationship between the lengthening spring days and our perceptions of the passage of time. We have started to talk about the end, and after, and we are at once already departed and more here than we have ever been.

Things have happened. A full recap is obviously out of the question, so I’m just going to pick some photos that I like and use them as an outline:

Sunday, February 15th, Café de la Poste, Manosque, France



That’s the post office there in the reflection. Right after I took this, two old men called me over to their table (and I went, as I am wont to do when old men call me over, as they are wont to do) and I somehow managed to incite an argument between them about Sarkozy, the watching of which was an entertaining way to spend an hour.

Thursday, February 19th, my dorm room, Manosque, France


Here’s Matt, taking a well-deserved rest after 20 hours of airplane and bus travel.

Friday, February 20th, Manosque, France


I live here.

Saturday, February 21st, Rocher de Bellevue, Saignon, France


About sixty seconds after I took this picture we decided to get married here.

Saturday, February 21st, St. Remy de Provence, France


Later that same day in St. Remy. I just like this picture.

Sunday, February 22nd, Manosque, France


We took advantage of having access to a real kitchen and threw a dinner party. Unfortunately, I forgot that everything is closed on Sunday, and ended up having to improvise dinner for 9 people with whatever I could scrounge from our dorm cupboard. We ended up having gluten-free taglietelli with baby artichokes, jambon, and chevre, an herbed pork loin (fortuitously purchased Saturday) cooked in (slightly aged) apples, roasted potatoes, salad, and a beautiful apple tart made my Linda. It was decidedly not my most successful culinary effort ever, but we didn’t starve (for food or good company).

Monday, February 23rd, somewhere in Provence, France


Goats!

Tuesday, February 24th, Amsterdam, Netherlands

I loved Amsterdam and took a gazillion pictures. Here are three:






These swans have a strong sense of irony.

Saturday, February 28th, Clessé, France


We spent two lovely days at the home of our friends Xavier and Regan in the wine country in Eastern France.

And then we all piled in le camping car and made our way, via Annecy…



to Switzerland.

Sunday, March 1st, somewhere in the Valais region of Switzerland


The Swiss wine makers have squeezed grape vines into every available square inch of their steep steep fields. It’s kind of amazing.

It was fun hanging out with Regan and Xavier and camping out by the side of Lake Geneva, but Switzerland was cold and expensive, and we were happy to get back to sunny Provence.

Saturday, March 7th, Roussillon, France

]

And eat one last time at our favorite place in Eygalières, where we managed to become regulars in the space of two weeks.



Monday, March 9th, Manosque, France



On Matt’s last day in Manosque, we all went up to the top of Mont d’Or…



…and had a chilly picnic.

Sunday, March 15th, Reillanne, France

The following Sunday, I was invited over by one of the professors who I work with for the most gorgeous Sunday lunch with her most gorgeous family.



March 15th was (supposedly) the last day for burning in our department (I have noticed that not everyone got the memo). Here’s Cris’ husband Alfie taking advantage.



Wednesday, March 18th, Saignon, France



Last Wednesday me and my posse rolled into Saignon to do some wedding business. We sat and had drinks at the Auberge next to this fountain, and, when the girls ordered sirops, the incredibly kind woman who was serving us brought out a pitcher, held it under the running stream of the fountain, and plunked it down on our table. It tasted extra good.

Friday, March 20th, the dorm hallway, Manosque, France

Which brings us to this past Friday, when we invited some friends over for another whatever-was-left-in-the-fridge dinner. We had potatoes baked in crème fraiche with gruyere, a zucchini fritatta, salad, pasta Bolognese (by Carmen, of course), and Mars ice-cream bars and champagne for dessert. Afterward, we did the only thing you can do when you find yourself forced to confront the inexorable march of time and (as Carmen beautifully put it as we were walking home late from the cinema a few days later) “le futur inconnu”: we danced.

Night One-Hundred and Fifty-Seven

on attende



Me and this dog, we're both waiting for something (though me with significantly more enthusiasm). Matt gets here in 4 hours...

Night One-Hundred and Fifty-Three

my favorite house in Manosque



Photographed today on the walk to Yves and Anne's for lunch, which was, yes, very delicious.

Night One-Hundred and Fifty-Two

saturday morning still life


espresso, Paris Match, Friday night detritus

Night One-Hundred and Fifty-One

au LEP, vendredi, 8h56



Took this on my way into work this morning at the LEP, where I spend my Fridays.

Night One-Hundred and Forty-Six

The sky is getting pretty again. I hope this means that Spring is coming.

Night One-Hundred and Twenty-Eight

mountain of gold

January 21st marked two special occasions: the first day we all got to say “President Obama”, and the first anniversary of my first date with the man who will be my husband by this time next year. It seemed like a good moment to climb something and take a look around, so Carmen and I found the highest point in the immediate vicinity – Mont d’or – and we went up it.

We didn’t really know the route, but we knew where to start and we figured if we just kept going up, eventually we’d get there.

And we did. It was a perfect, sunny day. The path up the mountain goes through olive orchards…







…and when you get to the top, there are two sides of a tower – the remnants of the dungeon of the palace of Count William I of Provence…





…and an unbelievable view of the countryside and the Luberon mountain range.



We took the wrong path to get back down and found ourselves on the backside of the mountain in the middle of a bunch of farms.



This, for some reason, made me feel completely giddy, but Carmen was less amused, having twisted her ankle, so I wandered way out into a field to ask a farmer which was the way back to Manosque. He gave me the most French directions ever (which is to say that he took about 15 minutes to say “take this road here and walk that way”) and I thanked him and walked away thinking about how scared I would have been to have had that same conversation a few months ago when I first arrived here.

Mais oui, comme tout, ça change.

Night One-Hundred and Thirty-Nine

lundi, 14h36

I came to Le Caffé to post a blog post that I wrote last night about climbing Mont d'or, but I forgot that it's Monday and the café is closed. So, I'm crouched on a stoop outside stealing their wifi, and I realized that this - this constant search for internet, dashed hopes and disabled wifi connections - has been such a huge part of my experience here that I should record it. So, here's the picture that I just took with PhotoBooth, of where I am, right now, this moment:

Nights Ninety through One-Hundred and Ten

Going back in time a bit to do a little Christmastime recap. There's too much to recount, so I hope this little montage (inspired by my friend Dorothy's 365 days of self-portraits montage) will make you feel like you were there. (The dorm computer and flickr are not cooperating, so I'm going to try posting this facebook video and see how it goes...)

Night One-Hundred and Twenty

Night One-Hundred and Seventeen

halfway

I flew back to France on the halfway day – night one-hundred and eleven (and a half), and spent the following week in a semi-conscious, time zone-shift-induced twilight. My body showed up in classrooms and bought itself 40-cent staff room cappuccinos and had conversations with people, but my brain remained hovering somewhere off the eastern seaboard. My heart, predictably, refused to let me jerk it around anymore and decided to stay behind.

But it’s Sunday now, the sun came out today, and my cells seem to have gathered themselves back together. It’s been unusually quiet here in on the quatrième étage this week. We are all trying to absorb, I think, the strange familiarity of this once exotic place, to take stock of the first half and hold it up against our prior expectations, to make a map of the second half that we hope will deliver us satisfactorily where we want to be when it’s all done.

Carmen and I went to Marseille yesterday to see the Van Gogh/Monticelli exhibit. Afterward, we sat at the Vieux Port and ate moules frites and drank too much, stumbled into a huge demonstration against Israel, got lost, got chased down the street by a kindly gas station attendant who had given us the wrong directions, finally made it back to the train station on the metro, fell asleep waiting and almost missed our bus back to Manosque, and dozed as we trundled back home, the city giving way to vineyards and villages. I keep forgetting to take pictures of that bus ride, but sometime in the next hundred and six nights, I promise, I’ll remember.

Nights Sixty-One through Seventy-Four

on beauty

The first time I tried to write this post, it was nights sixty-one through seventy. The second time it went through seventy-three. Now I have lived another day, and I’m sitting here at the end of it searching for a some theme, some thread, some…connecting fiber, if you will, to coalesce the past two weeks into a coherent post. And, you want to know what’s nice? When you set yourself to that task, and the answer that comes back is beauty.

First of all, I stole my title from Zadie Smith’s gorgeous novel, which has kept me excellent company over most of the time that this post covers, and that I can’t recommend highly enough. So there’s beauty number one.

B of all (hi honey!), I spent an exceptionally lovely Thanksgiving week in Florida with my betrothed and his (soon, happily, to be my) wonderful family. Beauty number two.





Then, at the end of the week, I got to put on a pretty dress and hold on to my handsome man and be showered with love and luck and wishes for our happiness. This is a pretty extraordinary fashion in which to be welcomed into someone’s family, but, from what I’ve observed, a fairly ordinary expression of the enormous grace and generosity of my future parents-in-law. Sara and Mort, thank you.


Marc Dahl took this photo. You can see more of Marc’s work here: modi5.com/matt_and_holly

Then there was some ugliness with an airline and a 4 day-long return trip to France, but I’ll skip over that except to say that the Meilleur Ouestern at the Marseille Airport has an excellent staff and a very serviceable bathtub that may have actually saved my life that night.

If you have to spend four days in airports and on airplanes and in buses and hotel rooms, I recommend coming home to something like this:



It will make you feel a lot better. We’re up to number 4 now.

Number five is being invited over to dinner chez Sandra and Remy, eating delicious pizza (well, the tops of delicious pizza for me) and drinking Beaujolais (c’est le moment), trying (and mostly failing) to play a trivia game based on French pop-culture, but starting to feel like we have some actual, real, live French friends.



Number six is today, when The Fig, The Pineapple, and I went to Marseille with yet another of our new French friends. (Getting French friends is like dominoes. Once you trick one of them into falling over…) We cued an hour and a half to get tickets to Aida (Verdi is like Sting here. Wait! God I’m old. I meant to say Hannah Montana. Hannah Montana!), failed to get tickets, but ended up spending a delightful afternoon walking along the water.


This is me, searching for rocks



Then we went to Vierge de la Garde (or Notre Dame de la Garde – Our Lady of the Watch, the guardian of seafarers) which I believe to be the most beautiful church I have been inside in my lifetime.







And that’s number seven.

I almost forgot one. Last night we watched the Miss France pageant, which claims to concern itself with beauty. It did give us the gift of seeing a bunch of girls dressed like knit toilet-paper cozies dance with a horse in a pool, so there’s that.



Miss Pays de Loire was robbed.

Nights Fifty-Six Through Fifty-Nine

la vie quotidian

Things that happened this week:

Someone’s boyfriend came to visit.
Someone went to see an action movie in French that turned out to be a historical drama in English.
Someone broke up with her boyfriend.
Someone found a giant green bug in her shoe.
Someone got yelled at for not having a cell phone.
Someone got back together with her boyfriend.
Someone ate pasta at least 11 times.
Someone finally wrote an important letter.

Things I took pictures of this week:


Lycée Regional Polyvalent Les Iscles (where I work)


again


and again


a good dog


a (very very French) movie being filmed in our town square


and light so nice…


…it even made our hallway pretty.


And a sunset…


…


…


…that just kept getting better


and dinner by candlelight (the power went out at the restaurant).

I’m off to Nice and then Florida. See you in December.

xo,

H